277 Quotes by Jesmyn Ward

I’m still ashamed that I did not step out of that dense grass, that I did not climb those steps and grab his hand and lead him down them as an elder sister should, that I did not say: Here I am, brother. I’m here.

Home ain’t always about a place. The house I grew up in is gone, ain’t nothin’ but a field and some woods but even if the house was still there – it ain’t about that. I don’t know. Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time.

In the end, I understand his desire, the self’s desire to silence the self, and thus the world.

By the time we get out of the car in the parking lot, the birds have turned north, fluttered over the horizon. I hear the tail end of their chatter, of all these voices calling at once, and I wish I could feel their excitement, feel their joy of the rising, the swinging into the blue, the great flight, the return home, but all I feel is a solid ball of something in my gut, heavy as the head of a hammer.

How the privilege of my education, my eventual ascent into another class, was born in the inexorable push of my mother’s hands. How unfair it all seemed.

There is laughter, shrill calls. Everyone is flirting, saying in nudges and jokes and blushing what they would do in private.

We live in a country where Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here. Dying in ship hulls, tossed into the Atlantic, hanging from trees, beaten, shot in churches, gunned down by the police, or warehoused in prisons: Historically, there is no quotidian without the enslaved, chained, or dead black body to gaze upon or to hear about or to position a self against.

I realized education wasn’t one choice. It was a lifetime undertaking.

I feel like I lost a game I didn’t know I was playing.